Mr T: I Pity the Fool review – a rare chance with an electrifying star … and they blew it

Here’s a question: when was the last time you had as good a time as when you were watching The A-Team as a child? Many of the best moments of the wholly unexpected documentary Mr T: I Pity the Fool recall his legendary turn as the soldiers of fortunes’ genius engineer, pugilist and instant fan favourite (not that we used the phrase then) BA Baracus. According to Mr T, the show was built around him; when you see now how well it plays to his talents and charisma – a proper tough guy, but shot through with warmth and humour, giving a perfectly outsize performance and never overplaying his hand – it makes a lot of sense, however much it would annoy George “Hannibal” Peppard to hear it.

He looks a bit older, but the charisma is absolutely intact. He sits alone in a darkened room, occasionally being played old footage of his career’s highlights and lowlights, dressed in a stars-and-stripes boiler suit and bandana. You cannot take your eyes off him.

He has done very few public interviews since his heyday, but the clips they show from that period are electrifying, especially his thrillingly uncompromising one with David Letterman in which he unsmilingly explains his look to the increasingly cowed host. The Mohawk-style haircut and feathered earrings honour his African Mandinka warrior heritage. The gold chains are a transmutation of the shackles his ancestors were put in.

He doesn’t get involved in “Black exploitation movies – no dope-dealing movies, no pimp roles … Give me the type of role you’d give Charlton Heston.” The audience laughs, not uneasily, missing and making his point. At the same time, his rise to fame and riches has an inescapably “only in America” feel to it. He was born Laurence Tureaud (spelled Tero throughout the documentary), one of 12 children to his loving and beloved mother Willa Lee, and brought up in an impoverished housing project in Chicago.

He and his brothers worked on their fitness together – by the time he was 15, he already looked like an athlete-cum-bodybuilder. He renamed himself Mr T “so that the first word out of people’s mouths was always ‘Mister’”, after watching his father and brothers – including a Vietnam veteran – being habitually addressed as “Boy”. When his mother was robbed by local “thugs”, he went looking for them; although the story is left unfinished, it is implied that he carried out some serious physical damage.

If so, it was a rare lapse in what seems to have been an otherwise hugely disciplined life. He worked three manual jobs until bouncing gave way to bodyguarding and an entree into the world of television, which led to him being spotted by Sylvester Stallone and cast as the antagonist Clubber Lang in Rocky III. He turned up word-perfect to the audition – discipline again – met the ad-libbing requirements and worked on the accent the part originally required.